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Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 1 | P a g e
VIETNAM ERA ORAL HISTORY
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee:
Daniel Lukins
Interviewer:
William Cobb
Date of Interview:
16 July 2010
Place of Interview:
George Sutherland Archives Orem, Utah
Recordist:
Brent Seavers
Recording Equipment:
Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcribed by:
Kendall Little
Audio Edit
Amy Wesson
Transcript proofed by:
Kimberly Williamson/William Cobb
Cover Summary
Kimberly Williamson
Completed and Posted
Reference:
WC=William Cobb (Interviewer)
DL=Daniel Lukins (Interviewee)
Brief Description of Contents:
Daniel Lukins enlisted in the US Army the day before he was to be drafted in 1966. He talks about being in Vietnam from January 1968 until January 1969 as a forward observer in the artillery and stationed at An Khe. He speaks about the role his unit played in the Battle of Hue, getting a purple heart along with other medals, and his second job as a liaison between artillery fire support and an infantry battalion. Lukins explains some of the operations they carried out while in Vietnam, his three years of active duty in Germany with an air defense unit, and his life after active duty. Currently, Lukins resides in Provo, Utah.
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as "uh" and false starts and stops in conversations are not included in transcription. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 2 | P a g e
AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION
[0:00:05]
WC: Today is July the 16, 2010. My name is William Cobb and I’m professor of History at Utah Valley University and today we are doing, as part of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project, doing an interview with Dan Lukins who is an administrator programmer at UVUi and Dan, I would like to start with asking you some fairly basic questions. So please give me your full name.
DL: Daniel William Lukins Jr.
WC: Your address?
DL: I live at 3278 North Canyon Road in Provo, [Utah].
WC: Date of birth?
DL: 23 November, 1941.
WC: Place of birth?
DL: Dallas, Texas.
WC: Were you raised anyplace other than your place of birth?
DL: Yes, I was raised in what is called the Tri-Cities area of Washington, southeastern Washington.
WC: Okay, and married children?
DL: I am married, yes, and I have three children.
WC: Now I would like to explore the period before you went to Vietnam, including up until the time when you enlisted and began your years as active duty. What were your feelings about the war during high school or during college, before you ever went in the military?
DL: Well, since I graduated in ’59 from high school. Vietnam was just barely beginning. I do not know if I even remember hearing, thinking, [and] knowing anything about Vietnam then. It was not until later that it starting picking up a little more in the early sixties. Sixty-one to ’63 I served an LDSii mission. During that period of time, I was not paying attention to the war either. It was one of those, I guess, like all things. Unless you are crazy, you do not want to be involved with it unless you have to. Being somewhat of a patriot, but not a run out and jump on and volunteer at least before this was considered. I had two older brothers that served during the Korean War. They both lied about their age and entered the military a little early. I was a little older on the other side of the coin when I went in. It just kind of loomed out there and I didn’t really pay a whole lot of Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 3 | P a g e
attention to it.
WC: How much did you know about the increasing American involvement, the history, the location, or the geography of Vietnam in that period?
DL: I knew it was in Southeast Asia somewhere that is about it. The political aspects of it, I knew very little.
WC: Okay.
DL: [I didn’t know] about what was going on other than the fact that anti-communist stance. That the North Vietnamese was aligned with the communist nations and South Vietnamese were not. Therefore, as American’s we were trying to— Or it was my opinion that we were trying to prevent the spread of Communism.
WC: Whatever information you had about Vietnam, or about the war, can you remember where that information came from? Was it television, newspaper, radio or sitting around talking with your family about it [maybe your] two older brothers saying something about Southeast Asia?
DL: — I don’t remember them saying much about it. My older brothers saw it on the news, probably a little bit in the paper, and people talking about it. Like when I got back off my mission in ’63, some of my high school friends had enlisted and had gone. People talked about why you have not wanted to talk to old classmates and things.
WC: Do you remember what the feelings of friends, parents, and others were about American involvement there? Was it caught up in the global struggle against Communism, or was there something else?
DL: Well, you know that I have a hard time remembering that far back anymore. (laughs) I don’t remember a great deal one way or the other, measuring in sentiments and things. I saw more on the news especially back east of anti-war sentiments. Then I saw personally, where I lived and grew up. It had seemed if anything more pro-involvement, than negative.
WC: Um-hm. You mentioned that you have a religious affiliation, with the LDS Church. Did that affiliation in any way affect your military service? Did religion affect your draft status, or your decision to go in, or help you get a deferment or anything like that?
DL: You know it probably did a little of all of that. (laughs) By serving a mission, I did get a draft deferment, while I was on my mission from the summer of ’61 [until the] summer of ’63. When I came back— Prior to going, I had worked for JC Penney Company. I went back to work for them part-time, went to local community college, [and] got a school deferment. I guess you would say there. The following year, I actually came down here to BYU.iii I guess I forgot to tell them where I was. When I went back home the next year and got married that fall. I went down to the draft board to register my Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 4 | P a g e
status. Their statement to me was, Oh, there you are. I knew that they were looking for me even though I had just gotten married. I started investigating. I will probably use this in some of the other questions but I started investigating what was available. So I would have a choice more than just, wherever they stuffed me.
WC: Um-hm.
DL: I was interested in flying, aircraft things. I investigated what they called the warrant officer training program for flight passed all the tests, physicals, and things. [I] couldn’t get a class date before I got my notice to come join the ranks. Essentially, I joined the day before I was to be drafted. I signed up for what was called air traffic control school. I would probably have been an out of work air traffic controller when Reagan— Was it Reagan who fired all of those guys?
WC: Reagan did.
DL: Yeah, I would have come out of the military with a federal license for air traffic.
WC: That was my next question is why did you enter the military? You enlisted in order to avoid being drafted?
DL: Yeah, [I] enlisted to avoid drafting. I knew I was going. So, I wanted to choose, if I could.
WC: Okay.
DL: I can’t say it absolutely 100 percent true. I think, as you mentioned my military status or church service was affected somewhat by my deferment for my mission. I think that was one of the reasons they were looking for me. The fact that I had gotten married made no difference to them. They had already singled me out for some reason.
WC: Yeah.
DL: They put the paperwork in.
WC: Okay.
DL: In order, so—
WC: What was your sense of patriotism and service to country before you went onto active duty or before you were in Vietnam.
DL: You know, being a dumb kid most of my life. You don’t think a whole lot about some of that stuff, but I enjoyed as a kid war movies. I used to like to go see all the old World War II movies. I remember doing that even during the war to some degree. The Korean War, my two [older] brothers of course were serving over there so, I had a connection, Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 5 | P a g e
with them. My next older brother was wounded in training activities prior to getting there. He never got to Korea. My oldest brother was in the Navy and he was on board the naval flagship off the coast there for a period of time. I guess I had a certain degree of patriotism based on family and friends that I knew that had served, and what the country stood for.
WC: Did you correspond much with your brothers while they were in Korea or through your parents saying, read letters home from them?
DL: Yeah, pretty much that any letter that came home was open game for all of us. They were not what I would call prolific, but what we could get we shared.
WC: Once you went on active duty and got orders to go to Vietnam. Did you ever consider not going? Did you ever think, no I just do not think I can do this?
[0:10:06]
DL: Not that I remember, I just felt it was part of my duty my responsibility to do so.
WC: Yeah, okay.
DL: Once called, I was going. I didn’t want to.
WC: In a basic training or AIT advanced individual training or in your case when you went to OCS officer candidate school how much did the instructors, or your classmates, or colleagues talk about Vietnam. What did they talk about? Did they talk about the rightness or wrongness of the war? Did they talk about the inevitability of your going?
DL: You know they talked about it more in a training sense most of the time. You had better learn this stuff or you’ll get yourself killed or somebody else killed. I don’t remember them really talking about political correctness of it. I don’t remember any of that. I mostly remember their emphasis on the training aspects. How much you needed to know this stuff because of it.
WC: Did you think on your own about, as you were getting closer to deployment, about the purpose of the war? Did you think about it in geopolitical or anti-communist containment?
DL: Probably in those kinds of ways. I did to some degree. In my mind’s eye that’s, why we were involved in the war was for the anti-communist containment and I was asked to help do that.
WC: Okay.
DL: I never did a lot of studying, or thinking deeply about it, or try to dig into other facts and figures. Even, any of the rumors that I heard that LBJiv owned a lot of construction Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 6 | P a g e
companies for building over there. (laughs)
WC: Let’s, switch now to the period while you were in Vietnam. Let me start with asking [what was your] branch of service?
DL: I was in the Army.
WC: Okay.
DL: I was in artillery. In [those] days, the air defense and artillery was a combined branch. It was split while I was in Vietnam, into air defense and field artillery.
WC: Right and you were on active duty in the Army from 1966 to 1973, so nearly seven—
DL: —Seven and a half years—
WC: —and a half years on active duty. Dates of service in Vietnam were from.
DL: The tenth or twelfth of January ’68 to the same time in ’69.
WC: You are just getting used to the humidity and the heat when the Tet Offensive hit—
DL: Yes, I spent the first two weeks at base camp in An Khe. The 1st Air Cav. Division’s base camp was in An Khe still at that time. In fact, it was still there when I left and they had the forward division. Forward was usually out wherever the troops were. It was in An Khe, which is in the central highlands, just east of Pleiku a little ways. We went to what they call charm schools. It was one week of what you would call Vietnam orientation. I know later as I went by those places you could see them sitting on the bleachers and just sitting there in that sun, heat, and humidity without doing anything. You could see the fatigue jackets were all sweated out. I guess, I was probably that way too when I came in. That’s the way you were, because I was in the artillery. My first assignment was as a forward observer. They sent me into another week of forward observer school, even though I had that training when I went in to officer candidate school. In fact, that was one of my few military honors that I achieved. I won the fort FOv shoot competition in OCS. They did things different in Vietnam. In OCS if it was going to be anywhere remotely within say, half to three/quarters of a mile, we were shooting from a controlling fire from a bunker and used what we called a BC scope. For those that don’t know what that is. It’s a pair of binoculars that’s on a, I don’t know what you call it, you’re looking down here and it looks out over here. Your head is not looking out the bunker at all, just the scope.
WC: Like a periscope?
DL: Yeah, it is kind of like a periscope. In Vietnam that was totally different. You were never— You were seldom in a bunker when you were controlling or adjusting fires. You got a lot closer to it. In fact, our trainer probably made a mistake. He would have been in Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 7 | P a g e
big trouble if somebody would have reported him because he was showing us the different deals that we were out walking and that. He would have them fire occasionally and as we would get closer the stuff would start falling in front of us. Then you would get a little closer and it started kind of falling around us. Then, a little bit later, if you got a little closer, we heard it go ZOOM by us. I think it could have killed somebody had it hit them. He would probably [have] been in big trouble if somebody would have said something about that one. The safety was gone pretty much over there. They spent a week retraining us on how to do things, how they did them over there.
WC: Tell us maybe we can bring the map in at this point but since you were involved quite heavily in the Battle of Fort Hue.vi Were you at Hue before you went to Khe Sanh?
DL: No—
WC: —To help the Marines up there?
DL: Yes—
WC: Or was it the other way around?
DL: No, the Counter Tet Offensive was before relieving the Marines at Khe Sanh.
WC: Uh huh.
DL: Let me find it on the (pointing to map) here. It is kind of hard to see, fist of all it is at a place called Camp Evans, just south of Quang Tri. It was strictly a military division four headquarters. You know, it stretched out pretty good because it was over a mile across, military encampment. We started out there (pointing to map) they sent us out on a place down the road a ways that was called PK 17. I was with the Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, and the 7th Cavalry. It was a South Vietnamese military post. We landed the helicopters there (pointing to map) and we were there for a couple of days. Then they sent us out after a downed helicopter and then we secured that. Then they sent us after another downed helicopter, which was in a little place just off highway one here (pointing to map) just on the west side of highway one. North of Hue about, I’m guessing somewhere around five or ten miles. They call it the TT woods, which is small woods. To me it looked like an over enlarged fairway. It was a long green strip. It was kind of doglegged in shape. It was probably two miles in length, a mile and a half in length, something like that. Basically, it was a farmer’s community where they normally would have lived. There was not anybody there. Then we were in another little smaller one, near it. [We] found out later that the downed helicopter in a rice paddy between our wood line and the other wood line. Had the— I think it was the 3rd core headquarters down there. They had a three-star Vietnamese general North Vietnamese in charge. They were heavily protected, dug in. It took us a while to make any in-roads into there.
I would say in the time we were there we physically lost about half of the company, I was with. Most of them were wounded and probably only a handful were actually killed. The Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 8 | P a g e
half that were wounded were gone for a while and some of them never came back. Some of them came back in a few days to a week or two depending on the seriousness of their injuries. That was one of the times that I think the troops learned to love their flak jackets. If you ever knew anybody with a flak jacket, they’re hot, they are heavy, and it was a pain in the rear to deal with them. We were being mortared on a regular basis. I think one of the infantry lieutenants was the real proving ground of how effective those flak jackets were, because he was sitting on the edge of a foxhole. One mortar round hit just behind him and literally shredded the backside of his flak jacket. When I went over there, I thought he was surely going to be dead. When I saw that, the inside of it just one or two pieces had penetrated it.
[0:20:00]
He was back out in the field in less than a week. After that, everybody knew flak jackets were a good thing. They saw for themselves that they worked. It was the only time, I think in Vietnam that I went on a battalion operation that they had the whole battalion. I said 1st Battalion, its 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry. The time we spent trying to penetrate that wood line over there it was not something easily done. We made an attack on it and were repulsed back. We got reinforcement from another battalion in a few days’. At nighttime [there were] forward observers. We would take turns at night. Naval ships would come in a little closer to the coastline at nighttime. We would adjust naval gunfire down into that area at night as well as any time they had any leftover ordinance from aircraft. We’d spot them somewhere in the—
WC: — Was this all part of the general effort to retake Hue, during Tet?
DL: Yeah, in fact at the time the Marines had come in from the south on three sides of Hue essentially. The north out to the A Shau Valley here (pointing to map) was the only one left open. We ended up closing that and when we closed it, they got out of the city. That is when they evacuated, is when we closed down there. During that period of time, I personally had more life-threatening encounters during that couple of weeks than the rest of my tour in Vietnam. It was early in my tour and I was beginning to wonder if the whole thing was going to be like this or not. In fact, that’s where I got my Purple Heart, as well as my Bronze Star, V Device, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.
WC: Did you actually— You know in this house-to-house street-by-street fighting that went on in Hue, were you—
DL: —I didn’t get involved
WC: —in the center?
DL: I read about it, you know in the Stars and Stripes Newspapers. As you remember, they had over there. It was telling about the house-to-house fighting just like in World War II in Germany. I never got involved in that physically because by the time we got right to the north edge of the city, they all left. They didn’t want to be, 100 percent surrounded Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 9 | P a g e
and so they left.
WC: Did, you move up to Khe Sanh, after that?
DL: No, we went back up to Camp Evans there, [our] main headquarters. Then we came out and established LZ on the, just on the edge of the mountains, between the A Shau Valley and Camp Evans there. LZ Long was named for a former battalion commander, Colonel Long. That was the battalion commander when I first joined the unit. He was replaced but they named it after him. The object was is to build supporting firebases all the way in to the A Shau Valley before the monsoon season hit. Then Khe Sanh came along where the Marines were being siege up here. Had two divisions of Marines up there and they could not get off their air base. They could not land planes on the runway or anything. They had to come in and just drop stuff out on a low flyover. They ceased that operation and took us up. I will always remember that day because the day we went into Khe Sanh was April Fools’ Day. You know, you read about all that stuff that was going on up there. Our company was selected to be the lead company for the division. The company commander was always in the first flight that went. Being his forward observer, I went with him. We were thankfully fogged in on our landing zone and so they took other bodies first. (laughs) I was expecting a lot of resistance. I can’t say I remember even being fired at in any point in time. You know maybe when we actually got on the airbase. I think maybe one time we were rocketed or something. No other time was my unit fired on. I guess they were effective in scaring them off.
WC: Tell us a little bit about life as a fire direction officer. You also spent time as a liaison officer and also as an executive officer so you were second in command for a company.
DL: Yeah, for a company size unit.
WC: —What do those jobs entail—
DL: —called batteries in orders.
WC: —and how is one different from another?
DL: You know the forward observer’s; in fact that was interesting [my] main job was to control the artillery fire in support of the troops. In conventional warfare, they taught us that 75 percent of all casualties are caused by artillery. They are a very important piece. The forward observers are what they call the eyes of the artillery. They are the ones that can see the enemy. With that high percentage of casualties caused by the artillery, you want to poke out the eyes. They always joked with us that the life expectancy of a forward observer in combat was about thirty seconds. That was in conventional type warfare and forward observers were with an actual unit. They were usually on the forward observer group, [which] was usually on their own in strategic locations to see the enemy. Vietnam there were no lines of demarcation as to where these are the front lines and these are the safe areas in the rear. There was no such thing. If you were there, that was your area and everything else was their area. That is kind of the way it always was. I Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 10 | P a g e
never went anywhere, as a forward observer that I was not with an infantry unit in support. Either down to platoon size is probably the smallest group I ever went with anywhere. I always had extra protection. Normally it was just the company-sized unit.
My second job, when I got relieved as forward observer. They sent me back to the firing battery to be one of the fire direction officers. They used to have two fire direction officers. We worked eight hours on, eight hours off, seven days a week. Arriving at the battery, they got a call from battalion headquarters. They wanted to talk to the battery commander, he came in, and I remember him saying, “But Sir, that’s being an Indian giver.” I knew he had to be talking about me because I just got there. (laughs) I said, “Okay where am I going?” They sent me out with the 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry as a liaison officer. The liaison officers helped control all the fire support for the infantry battalion from the battalion level and worked directly with the battalion commander and the battalion operations officer in doing so. We had our little area inside their technical operations center. Then any time that the battalion commander went somewhere that wasn’t to a staff meeting, I went with him. Being 1st, Air Cav. everywhere we went was in helicopters. That’s why I have at least one air medal. I probably should have gotten several others but no one ever kept track of my hours (laughs) officially.
WC: So it was a liaison between different echelons more than it was a liaison with let’s say the South Vietnamese military.
DL: It was a liaison between the artillery fire support and the infantry battalion itself.
WC: Okay.
DL: I was involved in all the planning of all the air assaults that were made at that point. Instead of going on them, I helped plan them. Then I went out with the battalion commander prior to the landing of the troops and adjusted fire onto the landing zone. [I] controlled the fire support to make sure that the area had been fired on before they landed the troops there.
[0:29:59]
I think my first action operation was as liaison officer. The first landing that we put out was my old company, Charlie Company. We put them on a hot LZvii so I was glad I was not the forward observer. (laughs) Even though they reported that, they had seen tracers coming up at our helicopter. When I told that to the Battalion S 2, he said, “Theirs or ours?” (laughs) Anytime when people are involved in accidents it is kind of a different kind of war that way. People did not like people telling you to go some place where you might get hurt. They tried to take it out on you. You heard of the times of people throwing hand grenades in either bunkers or foxholes with the commanding officers just because they didn’t like them and didn’t want to have to follow them anymore because he was too dangerous.
WC: That was happening even in early ‘68?Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 11 | P a g e
DL: Oh, yeah.
WC: Fragging or what was called fragging.
DL: Yep, that was going on. The second company commander I worked with Charlie Company the 5th of the 7th had been one of those bodies. He had been in there, I guess in the same foxhole with the hand grenade. I am pretty sure it wasn’t theirs. I never saw any; I guess that maybe they had some. I never saw one. (laughs) My several months running around in the field with an infantry company never saw them with a hand grenade. I assume it was one of ours. After he was healed up, he was sent back out into the field. It had a great effect on him. He was somewhat scared, I think. It affected the way he led that company it made the battalion commander mad at him. One time in the A Shau Valley, he sent us on a special mission, because we were being fired on several times from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, just south of where it came out of Laos. He sent us around the back way and he figured it would be a one-day operation. In three days, we were not where we supposed to be. I know at one time, at least in one day the front of the company passed me three times. They were going in circles. Now I don’t know if that was a collision between the company commander and the platoon leaders in the lead or if they were just that lost in the jungle like that. But, three times they passed me.
WC: Did you find yourself worried about being fragged yourself being and officer.
DL: No, because I wasn’t in what you would call command type position. I was there to support [them] and to help protect. I wasn’t there to lead them or direct them in anything that they did. I had a pretty good relationship with all the troops. In fact, they even told me that they had put a price on the battalion commander’s head. One time when I was the liaison officer, I was just over across the firebase talking to them one day. I said, “Wait minute guys. You can’t do that. He’s not the only one in that helicopter. Number one, I am there and so are several other people.” You know you wonder about that sometimes. The battalion commander at that time was a fairly gung-ho individual. He was interested in getting enemy body counts. He pushed his troops pretty hard into doing that. He was not very popular with the troops but he did get results.
WC: I was going to ask about that very thing. How you feel about the American strategy of body count versus taking and holding territory. What kind of an effect did that have on the morale of the men although you have almost already answered that?
DL: Yeah, I guess pretty much I did. You held some territory but most of it was open area. You wandered through to see what you could find, root out, [and] destroy. Soon as you, left it was free again to whomever and generally speaking they owned it. They tried to stay away from us as much as possible. That was one of the other strange things. It was real hard as a forward observer to provide a lot of fire support for them because when we got caught in ambushes. It wasn’t because we were a little ways away from them. We were usually very close to them. To bring in artillery fire would have probably been more dangerous to us than it would have been to them. We usually had to back off Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 12 | P a g e
before I was of much use. That is kind of like where I got my purple heart. We had got caught in an ambush just on the north side of Hue. In fact, it was the last obstacle we had before we walked into the city. We got caught in the ambush out in the rice paddies. We backed up to the last little housing area myself, the battalion operations officer, the artillery liaison officer, and at least two other of the forward observers plus our RTO.viii Were all congregated in this one little spot trying to figure out what to do and what kind of fire support we needed. We kept seeing these mortar rounds come in and they landed probably a good hundred, 150 yards short of us. They came in pairs of two. Every few minutes they would do that but they were always about the same distance short. Then all of the sudden one landed out in the road by us. I think out of the group of us that here was only two or three that did not pick up some kind of shrapnel. I was one of the fortunate ones. I was not severely wounded but it was enough to get my Purple Heart. I had a small piece of shrapnel probably just on my wrist here, near my watch area. In fact, I think probably the little white spot right there. Then another one went under my flak jacket. It went under the skin and sunk up against my collarbone. That’s what we were doing. We backed off our shooting so we were hammered like fools. We are all congregated in one spot in the open, and they caught us doing that.
WC: While you were in Vietnam, how did you feel about the win ability of the war given the strategy of body counts and the falling morale and other factors?
DL: I would say it appeared from everything I could see that we were winning. Our body count to our losses, we counted many more bodies than we lost, and especially killed. We never saw one of their bodies unless it was dead and a lot of times we didn’t even see those. They were very good about hauling them off. Anyway, they could and I think that was probably to keep us from knowing how many we had killed or wounded. They got rid of them if they could, but we still counted more bodies than we ever lost. It appeared from that standpoint that we were winning. There was a lot more going on. We had all the fire support, all the air support, and they had they had very little. They had some mortars, some rockets, but they had no air. I never saw a Vietnamese aircraft period, at least not among the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese. We had all the superior firepower. I don’t remember ever being fired on by any well— I take it back. I’m not sure if it was a tank or an actual gun emplacement. When we were in the A Shau Valley, I picked up the shell fragments from it. Fortunately, I wasn’t in it (laugh) and it went right through.
That was interesting too— probably the way we lived in the field. Instead of pup tents, which were heavy canvas we used ponchos, which were very light. By snapping two ponchos together and cutting down either some bamboo or other limbs and trees. You could build yourself a little tent to sleep in. If you acquired a third poncho you would close in one end of the little tent that you made. Myself, my Recon sergeant, my RTO all slept in the same tent usually. At this particular point in the A Shau Valley where we were sitting just off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, essentially cutting it so that they could not bring supplies and things down the trail. They brought in, I was told after I picked up some of the shell fragments and they analyzed them a 76 mm gun off a tank.
[0:40:02]Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 13 | P a g e
I could see the muzzle flashing but I could never see what it was coming from. Probably, I am guessing about a mile across the ravine there. The trail came in Laos, then off Little Finger, made a little U, and then came down into the A Shau Valley. We were sitting right up on the end of it there. There is a little ravine down where it came in to Laos. That was the other thing that was frustrating. We were not allowed to shoot into Laos. I tried to trick them one time after we first got there, by starting short and keep adjusting it further, because I could see people on the Laotian side of the border coming down the trail. As I got close to the border, the fire direction officer had done his homework already and had his charts set up even though he had only been there a very short time. He asked how many more adjustments I was going to do, because we were getting close to the border. (laughter) I canceled the firing—
WC: —As many as it takes.
DL: I was hoping he didn’t have his charts set up where knew where the border was yet.
WC: Yeah.
DL: But he did so.
WC: How much did you know about what was happening in the United States at the time that you were there? Did you know about the increased activism of the anti-war movement? Especially, in response to the Tet Offensive did you have the paper, Armed forces radio or—
DL: —Radio and strictly the—
WC: — and how did how did you feel about what was happening in the States—
DL: — Stars and Stripes newspaper was what we saw. There was things in there pretty much that you saw, the anti-war sentiments. I don’t remember them particularly talking about the Tet Offensive necessarily.
WC: Well my point is that the Tet Offensive just fueled the anti-war movement. The skepticism directed at Lyndon Johnson and if we were winning the war then how could the enemy have mounted this kind of offensive. That was like fanning the flames of the anti-war movement. How did you all talk about the anti-war movement or talk about what was happening back in the, in the States?
DL: Oh yeah, we joked about it a little bit. Things, they would say, don’t tell anybody you are a vet or you would take your medals down to coffee shop and a quarter you could get a cup of coffee. You know things like that. It was bothersome to realize you weren’t really being supported from home. There was a lot of anti-war. I have to admit, Clinton was one of the biggest ones later that bothered me, being president of the United States. I call it that, I guess this is my opinion, cowarding out and running off to another country to Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 14 | P a g e
avoid serving. I don’t think he had a right to be president because of that but my opinion.
WC: You say you shared a poncho with two other guys. Was that part of the conversation sometimes at night? What is happening back in the United States and are the people back there supporting us –
DL: –You know politically I don’t remember talking about that at all.
WC: –and like, any letters from home that.
DL: Sometimes talk about war, talk about families things like that but the people I was with we seldom talked about the political aspects of the war.
WC: Okay. The press coverage did not affect you that much because it was mostly Stars and Stripes.
DL: Yeah.
WC: As I recall from Stars and Stripes from the time I was this little it was mostly sports coverage anyway.
DL: We had a couple photographers with us there on that counter Tet Offensive as we hit what we called the earlier, in the TT woods. When we actually finally made the final attack there and took over than north end of that area we did have two photographers with us.
WC: Okay, let’s switch now for the last part to when you came back to the states. Tell me when you were separated from active duty and were you discharged at the same time or did you go into inactive reserve period after that?
DL: No. When I came back, I came back as a first lieutenant and was promoted to captain about a month and a half later. I was at Fort Ord, California as a basic training company commander. I was in for about four more years after that. I do not know if you want to cover any of that periods or just when the war phased down and they actually got out of it. During the war they had accelerated promotions. I was promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant, it was twelve months and then it was only another twelve months from second lieutenant to captain. At the time, I was promoted to captain the average time and grade to promotion to major was about thirty-three months. When I got out I had four and a half years time and graded as captain and I still needed another four years to be eligible for promotion to major. Everything lengthened back out again and by doing, that they left a lot of people stuck at captains. They came through and looked for voluntary discharges. They went through and took out everybody they didn’t want, that they felt from their efficiency reports and things that they did not meet standards. Then they came back and riffed about 5,000 officers of which about 4,500 of them were captains. Then the next year they came back and riffed another 5,000, almost all of them captains, and I was one of them. Part of the criteria for that was the fact that I was a Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 15 | P a g e
reserve officer on active duty. My commission out of OSC was as a reserve officer and they could not riff any of what they called RA or regular officers.
WC: Was that okay with you to get out at that point—
DL: —I had not planned on it but yeah. They gave me the GI bill that allowed me to go back and finish my education, which I wanted to do anyway. My wife enjoyed not being, able to use her favorite statement that was always “I hate the Army.” I think it was probably better not moving around so much and things like that.
WC: Yeah. How do you think having been in Vietnam affected you when you were at Fort Ord or trying to make that decision about whether I should stay in or maybe is this a good idea for a career or not?
DL: Yeah well, it is part of the reason I switched to the air defense branch at that time. I thought well if I stay, they are not sending them back as often. That is how I got to Fort Bliss, Texas and three years I spent in Germany was with an air defense unit. Other than that, probably didn’t think a lot. I just looked at how often the people were going back to Nam and trying to minimize my chances. I had a year and a half of college. What was available to somebody in in my position like that? I needed a lot of education to get a decent job to support a family. At that point in time, I had a wife— well I was married before I went in. Then we had my oldest daughter [who] was three months old when I deployed to Vietnam. Somewhere, you have to support your family and at the time, I was making good money relatively speaking. I was making as much money as most college graduates and had been out for a year or two. It looked like a good way to go as long as I could keep from being killed doing it.
WC: What was coming home like? You were still on active duty and you continued on active duty but what was it like to leave Vietnam and come back to the United States? When you were around your friends or around your family how did it feel?
DL: Well it felt good to be back. Family and friends that I knew, most of them were supportive you know. I never ran in to the problems a lot of people ran in to when they seemed to be hated and things like that because they’d served. Of course my two older brothers both had served during Korea and they were aware of the military experience. My young brother joined the Navy about six months after I went in and he was in during that whole period of time also. In fact, he died of cancer about, a year I think after I got out. You know, I didn’t see a whole lot of difference before and after being in Vietnam, personally. Either that or I was just too dumb to realize I was being discriminated against or whatever because of it. (laughter)
[00:50:03]
DL: I just didn’t notice it.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 16 | P a g e
WC: So, what year would it have been that you would have been’73 that you came to Provo to finish school?
DL: Yeah, that is when I was just finishing a tour of duty in Germany. I had been slated to go to the career course at Fort Bliss, Texas when the riff came through. I came here to finish school and we thought just for a couple years. It turned out I been here now thirty-seven. (laughs)
WC: What was the feeling here in Utah Valley about Vietnam? When people found out that you were a veteran did that matter?
DL: Most people seemed very supportive. I guess, for a place in the country to be it was a good place, because of the Church associations and people looked at you as a friend. I can’t remember at any place, any time that I remember anybody discriminating against me or making negative comments towards me because I was a veteran.
WC: If you feel as though other people’s feelings about you and your service had not changed or was not negative. How were your feelings about trust in the government, or patriotism, or love of country, or cynicism about what the government says to justify. For example, actions in Vietnam had you become anymore cynical as a result of being in Vietnam about what the government said and believing it?
DL: I think if you want to call it cynicism I had, was the fact that we pulled out without completing the mission. I thought we wasted a lot of people’s lives, time, and money not to accomplish what we set out to do.
WC: Okay.
DL: Giving up personally hurt.
WC: For you the problem was not that the war was wrong or unwinnable, for you the problem was that the war was just not completed.
DL: Yeah—
WC: —It wasn’t prosecuted correctly—
DL: —We didn’t have a decision made. Just like Korea, we never made a decision in Korea. We are still having trouble with Korea.
WC: Yeah, okay. Were there any veteran services when you came back? Were there any opportunities among other vets or other groups of people? Maybe it was within the Church to talk out your experiences to help you assimilate or to adjust better to society?
DL: I never really felt like I had any problem. You know, if there were services available I Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 17 | P a g e
didn’t seek them and nobody sought me to be a part of them. I have never had nightmares about it. I felt, I did duty and accomplished my responsibility in a manner in such I have no regrets about what I did or how I did it for the most part. I mean, you know there are always little things here and there we should have done differently. I felt I served my country honorably and I had no regrets.
WC: What movies have you seen about the war or books have you read about the war—
DL: —I’m not much of a book reader so
WC: —Were any of them particularly accurate?
DL: I have seen a few yeah. Was it, John Wayne and The Green Berets? I saw Platoon. Seemed like there was another one but I remember the name of it. Platoon was probably the most, what I would consider accurate depiction of the war that I saw. Even though the experiences they put into a few day periods there was about what I experienced the whole year I was there. That’s what you got to do in Hollywood. You have to make all—
WC: — It’s Oliver Stone—
DL: — You can’t have all the dull stuff in between. (laughs)
WC: Did you see Full Metal Jacket?
DL: No, I have never seen that one.
WC: Okay, because you were in Hue that’s what—
DL: — that is what it is about?
WC: — half of the movie is about Hue.
DL: Yeah, okay.
WC: Have you, have you ever thought about going back to Vietnam? Have you been back, or do you want to go back?
DL: — I have not been back and in fact, my middle daughter right now lives in Singapore. At some point in time, I am hoping to get out to visit her there. One of the things she mentioned is that they have tours out there to go back to Vietnam.
WC: Right.
DL: [She] wanted to know if I would be interested in that. I thought it might be interesting to do. Depending on how restricted you are from where you go, what you can do to see some of the places that I have been.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 18 | P a g e
WC: What do you think that life would be like for you today if you had not gone in to the military? A follow-up is if you had not gone to Vietnam who would Dan Lukins be today?
DL You want to know the honest truth? I would probably end up being a retired JC Penney worker. (laughs) I worked on and off with JC Penney for a little over four years both before and after my LDS mission. In fact, I graduated from high school when I was seventeen and about a month after I turned eighteen I was the shoe department manager for one of the old small Penney stores. They did not have the big malls in those days where you had these huge, humungous big stores. I went in to what they call the JC Penney managerial training program. I used to come in early and study these manuals books I would work on. I shifted my major in college from math and sciences to business. Thought that is probably what I would do with my life. I probably would have considered and continued in that career line.
WC: What do you think the United States has learned from its experiences in Vietnam?
DL: Well seeing that they did almost the same thing that they did in Korea I don’t think, (laughs) I hope they have learned something. To me, you don’t get involved in things if there is not a reason to. If you have a reason to, then do it. I can see why, politically speaking, they had to get out because they were going to lose the election. (laughs) It was becoming a political game and I hate wars being fought by politicians. Don’t fight them if that is the case or let the politicians go and fight them. (laughs) Let them see what it’s like and maybe they will not have so many. Yeah, but if it is going to be a political thing then forget it.
WC: In looking at Iraq and Afghanistan do you see anything that we are doing correctly with regard to those wars that we may have learned a lesson from Vietnam? That can include military strategy, or the reasons for being there, or could include the way that a soldier men and women are treated in country when they come back.
DL: I think they are treated better as (laughs) a whole coming back just from what I saw [in the] news coverage not from my own personal experience. I think they are trying, at least I don’t think they went in to Iraq and Iran to totally take over the country. They were trying to secure a government in place. They are trying and it appears they are trying now. South Vietnam lasted how long after we pulled out. Was it even twelve months?
WC: The war went on for two more years from ’73 to ’75 then the south just collapsed.
DL: They lasted two years. I think they are trying not to let that happen in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They are trying to get the government there that can sustain support. You are, coming up with a totally different ballgame there. I mean in in Vietnam, Korea we didn’t have anybody that was threatening the United States directly. With Iran and Afghanistan factions that are there and using those as safe havens are threatening the US and so it is kind of a different. I think 9/11 made that war seem way different because no Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 19 | P a g e
time during Korea and no time during Vietnam did we have anybody blow up anything in the US by a foreign power.
[1:00:09]
WC: Yes, that is a curious thing about Vietnam is that if you ask the question who won that war or who lost that war the answer’s probably the North Vietnamese won the war because they accomplished their objective.
DL: That’s what I would say.
WC: But if you look at the physical United States after the war and you look at the physical Vietnam after the war. You are going to come to a different conclusion because that country was devastated.
DL: Oh, yeah.
WC: Physically, and any other way by that war the United States was untouched. I’m not talking about the way people were treated. It’s an interesting way to define loss and victory because the United States was never threatened, never touched, never bombed. Twice the tonnage of bombs were dropped on Vietnam then were dropped in all of World War II all around the world.
DL: I saw some of those—
WC: — But they won the war.
DL: (laughs) I saw some of those close-up. Couple of them scared me. I thought they were a little too close. One woke me up in the middle of the night, one of the little B-52 arc lights. When I was talking about the action in the A Shau Valley there were two, [that] came across Little Finger and then down into the valley. They ran and I have to admit those guys were accurate. I mean they came right down there and they went right down that finger, and hit it. They did not hit off behind it and they didn’t hit off in the valley. They walked it right in that finger; right off, that road and they came back and hit it going the other way. Scared the devil out of me though because I didn’t know what was going on because I was asleep [and] they did not tell us it was coming.
WC: Last question I have is do you have a message for students today or students in the future who are going to—
DL: — Well, you kind of touched on it there a little bit. They say there are winners and losers in wars but everybody loses. War is hell. I saw a lot of people thinking it was a glorious thing to go to war but once they were there they soon learned that it’s not. It is scary, it’s hard, it’s dangerous, and it’s not even comfortable. I’m a person that didn’t have much trouble sleeping but I had a hard time sleeping with rain drizzling in my face. It just did not work well. I even slept on the hard rocks a couple times. My air mattress that I Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 20 | P a g e
normally carried with me— That’s one of the things I mentioned about the tank firing earlier. That one of the rounds from that went right through my tent went in one side, out the other side, hit a log about ten feet the other side then it went off and totally shredded my air mattress and my tent. (laughs). Fortunately, I was not in it, nor was my Recon sergeant or my RTO. Because when the firing started we immediately moved to a different position to observe what was going on and see if we could return fire. This was a very difficult thing because I couldn’t tell who was firing what. I couldn’t pick my rounds out from anybody else’s so I couldn’t adjust them. (laughs) I told them to cancel the fire mission. I’ll wait until (laughs) something else so I can do something productive. No sense wasting all that ammunition when you don’t know where it is going.
WC: Do you want to tell us a little about what you brought what we commonly refer to as fruit salad. Do you want to tell us about your campaign ribbons and I will just ask if anybody else has a question before we close?
DL: Oh yeah, I guess I got nine ribbons, ten awards actually. I have two Bronze Stars, one V Device is for valor. The Oak leaf cluster was for mediatory service. The Air Medal was awarded on a certain number of combat assault missions that you went on or a number of actual hours you were in the air over a combat area. I never guessed, I probably would of actually earned somewhere between ten and twenty medals. When you see the Air Medal you see them with numbers on them because of that. The Purple Heart, I talked about a little bit earlier. I got there, in fact the Bronze Star V Device also came and part of the Air Medal was earned there. And down here this is an award from the Vietnamese government; it’s called the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star. Even though I should have polished it up, it looks a little more bronze right now a little dirty. Same way with the US awarding here is what’s called the Vietnamese Service Ribbon. I have Five Campaign Stars and for five they put silver on it. It was always more impressive when it had four. I had Four Bronze Stars across there it looked more impressive than the one silver star. The Army Commendation Medal here is one I got at Fort Ord, California when I was basic training company commander. For the quarter my basic training company and I would say probably about twenty-five training companies, well we won every competition there was (laughs) that cycle, or that quarter. I was almost in the process, I think I had my orders already to go to Fort Bliss, Texas to join the Chaparral Boldron unit there that was going to deploy to Germany. And then talking to the battalion commander one day and he was talking about all the things that had happened and I just happened to mention to him, I says, “Got enough to get an Army Commendation medal?” He says, “I will put you in for that.” So he did. Good conduct medal is awarded to enlisted men only. You have to have at least one year of enlisted service with no problems. I barely qualified for that. One year and almost exactly to the day from the time I enlisted I got my commission as second lieutenant. I got that—
WC: —Oh, so you did not get in trouble you just got promoted to second lieutenant—
DL: —I just got promoted to second lieutenant, yeah.
WC: I thought there was a better story in this.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 21 | P a g e
DL: Well, it was always interesting. When I originally went in, I was interested in aviation. I figured after I got in I would reapply for flight school. I signed up for Air Traffic Control School as I mentioned earlier. While I was at basic training, I started taking all these battery of tests. They took me for everything, I was qualified for it seemed like and the only thing I was not qualified for was West Point because I was married. (laughs) They didn’t take me for that. But OCSix was one of the things they took me out and tested me for. We had one captain [and] one second lieutenant because of the shortage of officers that is we only had two instead of six officers in the company. The captain we seldom saw so the second lieutenant that was in the company did everything. He says you don’t want to be a second lieutenant, at least not on this post. (laughs) He was trying to talk us out of it, all of us that went to take the OCS test. Commissioned officers are there to affix responsibility and second lieutenants, that’s as far down the hill as everything can flow. They’re the ones who get all the dirty jobs. Later you get to tell who gets what jobs. The green ribbon down here is actually a Vietnamese awarded Service Ribbon and the other one is a National Defense Service Medal. They’re all in according to rank, according to who awards them. In other words, all US awards are first by rank, the Bronze Star being the highest on the ones I have. This is the dividing line between the American awarded, the Vietnamese awarded medals, and so they are in rank according to how they fit in the Vietnamese.
WC: I am very impressed that you remember all of that. Are there any questions that you all have before we go? Brady?
Brady: I have a question. Do you keep in contact with any friends from Vietnam or your military service at all?
DL: Not really. I did for a while but not from Vietnam. No I don’t think I ever got a home address of anybody. I mean the people I served with. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever even seen anybody, I knew in Vietnam since I’ve been back and I can’t remember ever seeing anybody.
[1:09:59]
WC: Do you; have any reunions you go to? Now that the internet has unit histories for just about every unit, have you checked on of those on there?
DL: Yeah, I keep getting in, been tempted but my wife is never interested in those kind of things. The 7th Cavalry always has a reunion every summer, somewhere. They include me as being a member of the 7th Cavalry because I was assigned to them as FO when I was a liaison officer. In fact, all the time I was in Vietnam whatever I did I was working with the 5th Battalion 7th Cavalry in one form or another that entire year. Some of the other people I ran into but mostly because the church associations stayed in touch with them, than from that. I think there were only four people I met in Vietnam that I knew before I went there. Two of them were in my OCS class and the third one I knew from church. He and I were both stationed at Fort Carson at the same time and both ended up Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 22 | P a g e
in Vietnam about the same time. Assigned to the same artillery unit, only he supported a different battalion of the 7
th Cavalry than I did. We ran into each other occasionally. In fact, we had our own church service those of us, had our own sacrament meeting the night before we went into Khe Sanh.
WC: Did you keep in touch with him when after Vietnam?
DL: No, I haven’t. I will not say why because somebody will probably see this and it will get back to her. Probably cut that part out. My wife has never been that interested in, for some reason, keeping track of them. I know one of them lives in St. George and I have been to St. George a few times. I know he’s there, but I’ve never looked him up because of that.
WC: Dane?
Dane: In general, how did the South Vietnamese accept us there?
DL: You know that’s real hard to say. Most everywhere I was personally, in Vietnam was what you call a free fire zone. If you saw Vietnamese in there, you assumed he was the enemy and you shot at him. I was in a base camp totally military buildup area and I was rarely anywhere else. I think when I was in An Khe, I went down to what they called Sin City to see what it was. It was just outside the thing. I guess one of the previous commanding generals of the 1st Air Cav. had set it up originally as a place for the soldiers to be, that was safe. You checked out all the prostitutes to make sure they didn’t have any venereal diseases. He got in big trouble for that one with the politicians when they when they found out so they cut the ties but it was still there when I was there. There was one other little village but at the time, they probably wouldn’t have been too happy with us. In what they called, a Court Rolling Search Operation a little village outside the base camp we were assigned to circle it and then go through it and look for any signs of anybody that might be associated with the enemy. They probably were not too happy with us. I rarely ever saw South Vietnamese people. South Vietnamese soldiers seemed to be friendly towards us. Now that’s one of the things, I thought was really interesting though, the South Vietnamese soldiers. My first experience seeing them was at the little place I told you about earlier called PK 17 and you’d see them walking down a path you know in uniforms. They are short people; probably you know most of them were not any taller than, five [foot] five [inches] at the most. But they would be holding hands. (laughs) Military uniforms with their weapons slung over the shoulder [and] holding hands. Different culture it was different. Loved their burial grounds, out in the rice paddies it was the only place that there was any protection because they were built up because of the water tables and things. They actually buried them on the ground and covered them up so there was a mountain. There was some place to hide behind. (laughs) The rice itself didn’t provide much protection. (laughter) Things like that I was amazed at how rundown— And I only saw a few rural schools and things like that. They were usually three to five room buildings that were really beat up pretty bad and run down. I felt sorry for them. Like Bill mentioned earlier, the war was all fought on their ground and it just literally destroyed the country in places. All that Agent Orange –I used to Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 23 | P a g e
watch them spray that all the time. I would see them fly over and spray areas and fly over that a couple months later and you could see the ground. You couldn’t see it before. Things like that, there was something else a thought popped into my mind then it popped back out.
WC: Well I hope on one of your trips to see your daughter in Singapore that you do take a side trip to Vietnam.
DL: She mentioned that was something she would be interested in.
WC: Yeah. Anymore questions before we go? Catherine?
CM: Just about the ribbons. Now this shows my ignorance of how that all works. The ones that came from the north, from the South Vietnamese government, was that awarded to you by a government official or was there a ceremony?
DL: Well the green and white one you just get for being there.
CM: Okay, alright.
DL: The other one was awarded by the Vietnamese Government but I think it was actually given to me by an American contingency.
CM: Okay, on behalf of them?
DL: On behalf of them.
CM: Alright, thanks.
WC: Good question, anything else?
DL: That’s the same way as the National Defense Service Ribbon. All you had to do was be in the military and you got that one. So everybody who was in the military got that one. You always got at least one.
CM: Okay, I haven’t heard much about that one.
WC: Well, then that brings to a close our interview and I want to say Dan, thank you so much.
DL: You are welcome.
WC: We’re very grateful for the information that you have given us.
DL: Sorry, I wasn’t more helpful on some of those questions.
WC: No, that’s wonderful. Thank you all for being here.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 24 | P a g e
[1:17:27]
END OF INTERVIEW
i (UVU) Utah Valley University
ii Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS)
iii (BYU) Brigham Young University
iv Lyndon Baines Johnson
v (FO) Forward Observer
vi Battle fought beginning January 31, 1968 when the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) soldiers launched a coordinated attack on the city of Hué.
vii (LZ)
viii (RTO) Radio Telephone Officer
ix(OCS) Officer Candidates School

Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 1 | P a g e
VIETNAM ERA ORAL HISTORY
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee:
Daniel Lukins
Interviewer:
William Cobb
Date of Interview:
16 July 2010
Place of Interview:
George Sutherland Archives Orem, Utah
Recordist:
Brent Seavers
Recording Equipment:
Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcribed by:
Kendall Little
Audio Edit
Amy Wesson
Transcript proofed by:
Kimberly Williamson/William Cobb
Cover Summary
Kimberly Williamson
Completed and Posted
Reference:
WC=William Cobb (Interviewer)
DL=Daniel Lukins (Interviewee)
Brief Description of Contents:
Daniel Lukins enlisted in the US Army the day before he was to be drafted in 1966. He talks about being in Vietnam from January 1968 until January 1969 as a forward observer in the artillery and stationed at An Khe. He speaks about the role his unit played in the Battle of Hue, getting a purple heart along with other medals, and his second job as a liaison between artillery fire support and an infantry battalion. Lukins explains some of the operations they carried out while in Vietnam, his three years of active duty in Germany with an air defense unit, and his life after active duty. Currently, Lukins resides in Provo, Utah.
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as "uh" and false starts and stops in conversations are not included in transcription. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 2 | P a g e
AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION
[0:00:05]
WC: Today is July the 16, 2010. My name is William Cobb and I’m professor of History at Utah Valley University and today we are doing, as part of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project, doing an interview with Dan Lukins who is an administrator programmer at UVUi and Dan, I would like to start with asking you some fairly basic questions. So please give me your full name.
DL: Daniel William Lukins Jr.
WC: Your address?
DL: I live at 3278 North Canyon Road in Provo, [Utah].
WC: Date of birth?
DL: 23 November, 1941.
WC: Place of birth?
DL: Dallas, Texas.
WC: Were you raised anyplace other than your place of birth?
DL: Yes, I was raised in what is called the Tri-Cities area of Washington, southeastern Washington.
WC: Okay, and married children?
DL: I am married, yes, and I have three children.
WC: Now I would like to explore the period before you went to Vietnam, including up until the time when you enlisted and began your years as active duty. What were your feelings about the war during high school or during college, before you ever went in the military?
DL: Well, since I graduated in ’59 from high school. Vietnam was just barely beginning. I do not know if I even remember hearing, thinking, [and] knowing anything about Vietnam then. It was not until later that it starting picking up a little more in the early sixties. Sixty-one to ’63 I served an LDSii mission. During that period of time, I was not paying attention to the war either. It was one of those, I guess, like all things. Unless you are crazy, you do not want to be involved with it unless you have to. Being somewhat of a patriot, but not a run out and jump on and volunteer at least before this was considered. I had two older brothers that served during the Korean War. They both lied about their age and entered the military a little early. I was a little older on the other side of the coin when I went in. It just kind of loomed out there and I didn’t really pay a whole lot of Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 3 | P a g e
attention to it.
WC: How much did you know about the increasing American involvement, the history, the location, or the geography of Vietnam in that period?
DL: I knew it was in Southeast Asia somewhere that is about it. The political aspects of it, I knew very little.
WC: Okay.
DL: [I didn’t know] about what was going on other than the fact that anti-communist stance. That the North Vietnamese was aligned with the communist nations and South Vietnamese were not. Therefore, as American’s we were trying to— Or it was my opinion that we were trying to prevent the spread of Communism.
WC: Whatever information you had about Vietnam, or about the war, can you remember where that information came from? Was it television, newspaper, radio or sitting around talking with your family about it [maybe your] two older brothers saying something about Southeast Asia?
DL: — I don’t remember them saying much about it. My older brothers saw it on the news, probably a little bit in the paper, and people talking about it. Like when I got back off my mission in ’63, some of my high school friends had enlisted and had gone. People talked about why you have not wanted to talk to old classmates and things.
WC: Do you remember what the feelings of friends, parents, and others were about American involvement there? Was it caught up in the global struggle against Communism, or was there something else?
DL: Well, you know that I have a hard time remembering that far back anymore. (laughs) I don’t remember a great deal one way or the other, measuring in sentiments and things. I saw more on the news especially back east of anti-war sentiments. Then I saw personally, where I lived and grew up. It had seemed if anything more pro-involvement, than negative.
WC: Um-hm. You mentioned that you have a religious affiliation, with the LDS Church. Did that affiliation in any way affect your military service? Did religion affect your draft status, or your decision to go in, or help you get a deferment or anything like that?
DL: You know it probably did a little of all of that. (laughs) By serving a mission, I did get a draft deferment, while I was on my mission from the summer of ’61 [until the] summer of ’63. When I came back— Prior to going, I had worked for JC Penney Company. I went back to work for them part-time, went to local community college, [and] got a school deferment. I guess you would say there. The following year, I actually came down here to BYU.iii I guess I forgot to tell them where I was. When I went back home the next year and got married that fall. I went down to the draft board to register my Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 4 | P a g e
status. Their statement to me was, Oh, there you are. I knew that they were looking for me even though I had just gotten married. I started investigating. I will probably use this in some of the other questions but I started investigating what was available. So I would have a choice more than just, wherever they stuffed me.
WC: Um-hm.
DL: I was interested in flying, aircraft things. I investigated what they called the warrant officer training program for flight passed all the tests, physicals, and things. [I] couldn’t get a class date before I got my notice to come join the ranks. Essentially, I joined the day before I was to be drafted. I signed up for what was called air traffic control school. I would probably have been an out of work air traffic controller when Reagan— Was it Reagan who fired all of those guys?
WC: Reagan did.
DL: Yeah, I would have come out of the military with a federal license for air traffic.
WC: That was my next question is why did you enter the military? You enlisted in order to avoid being drafted?
DL: Yeah, [I] enlisted to avoid drafting. I knew I was going. So, I wanted to choose, if I could.
WC: Okay.
DL: I can’t say it absolutely 100 percent true. I think, as you mentioned my military status or church service was affected somewhat by my deferment for my mission. I think that was one of the reasons they were looking for me. The fact that I had gotten married made no difference to them. They had already singled me out for some reason.
WC: Yeah.
DL: They put the paperwork in.
WC: Okay.
DL: In order, so—
WC: What was your sense of patriotism and service to country before you went onto active duty or before you were in Vietnam.
DL: You know, being a dumb kid most of my life. You don’t think a whole lot about some of that stuff, but I enjoyed as a kid war movies. I used to like to go see all the old World War II movies. I remember doing that even during the war to some degree. The Korean War, my two [older] brothers of course were serving over there so, I had a connection, Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 5 | P a g e
with them. My next older brother was wounded in training activities prior to getting there. He never got to Korea. My oldest brother was in the Navy and he was on board the naval flagship off the coast there for a period of time. I guess I had a certain degree of patriotism based on family and friends that I knew that had served, and what the country stood for.
WC: Did you correspond much with your brothers while they were in Korea or through your parents saying, read letters home from them?
DL: Yeah, pretty much that any letter that came home was open game for all of us. They were not what I would call prolific, but what we could get we shared.
WC: Once you went on active duty and got orders to go to Vietnam. Did you ever consider not going? Did you ever think, no I just do not think I can do this?
[0:10:06]
DL: Not that I remember, I just felt it was part of my duty my responsibility to do so.
WC: Yeah, okay.
DL: Once called, I was going. I didn’t want to.
WC: In a basic training or AIT advanced individual training or in your case when you went to OCS officer candidate school how much did the instructors, or your classmates, or colleagues talk about Vietnam. What did they talk about? Did they talk about the rightness or wrongness of the war? Did they talk about the inevitability of your going?
DL: You know they talked about it more in a training sense most of the time. You had better learn this stuff or you’ll get yourself killed or somebody else killed. I don’t remember them really talking about political correctness of it. I don’t remember any of that. I mostly remember their emphasis on the training aspects. How much you needed to know this stuff because of it.
WC: Did you think on your own about, as you were getting closer to deployment, about the purpose of the war? Did you think about it in geopolitical or anti-communist containment?
DL: Probably in those kinds of ways. I did to some degree. In my mind’s eye that’s, why we were involved in the war was for the anti-communist containment and I was asked to help do that.
WC: Okay.
DL: I never did a lot of studying, or thinking deeply about it, or try to dig into other facts and figures. Even, any of the rumors that I heard that LBJiv owned a lot of construction Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 6 | P a g e
companies for building over there. (laughs)
WC: Let’s, switch now to the period while you were in Vietnam. Let me start with asking [what was your] branch of service?
DL: I was in the Army.
WC: Okay.
DL: I was in artillery. In [those] days, the air defense and artillery was a combined branch. It was split while I was in Vietnam, into air defense and field artillery.
WC: Right and you were on active duty in the Army from 1966 to 1973, so nearly seven—
DL: —Seven and a half years—
WC: —and a half years on active duty. Dates of service in Vietnam were from.
DL: The tenth or twelfth of January ’68 to the same time in ’69.
WC: You are just getting used to the humidity and the heat when the Tet Offensive hit—
DL: Yes, I spent the first two weeks at base camp in An Khe. The 1st Air Cav. Division’s base camp was in An Khe still at that time. In fact, it was still there when I left and they had the forward division. Forward was usually out wherever the troops were. It was in An Khe, which is in the central highlands, just east of Pleiku a little ways. We went to what they call charm schools. It was one week of what you would call Vietnam orientation. I know later as I went by those places you could see them sitting on the bleachers and just sitting there in that sun, heat, and humidity without doing anything. You could see the fatigue jackets were all sweated out. I guess, I was probably that way too when I came in. That’s the way you were, because I was in the artillery. My first assignment was as a forward observer. They sent me into another week of forward observer school, even though I had that training when I went in to officer candidate school. In fact, that was one of my few military honors that I achieved. I won the fort FOv shoot competition in OCS. They did things different in Vietnam. In OCS if it was going to be anywhere remotely within say, half to three/quarters of a mile, we were shooting from a controlling fire from a bunker and used what we called a BC scope. For those that don’t know what that is. It’s a pair of binoculars that’s on a, I don’t know what you call it, you’re looking down here and it looks out over here. Your head is not looking out the bunker at all, just the scope.
WC: Like a periscope?
DL: Yeah, it is kind of like a periscope. In Vietnam that was totally different. You were never— You were seldom in a bunker when you were controlling or adjusting fires. You got a lot closer to it. In fact, our trainer probably made a mistake. He would have been in Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 7 | P a g e
big trouble if somebody would have reported him because he was showing us the different deals that we were out walking and that. He would have them fire occasionally and as we would get closer the stuff would start falling in front of us. Then you would get a little closer and it started kind of falling around us. Then, a little bit later, if you got a little closer, we heard it go ZOOM by us. I think it could have killed somebody had it hit them. He would probably [have] been in big trouble if somebody would have said something about that one. The safety was gone pretty much over there. They spent a week retraining us on how to do things, how they did them over there.
WC: Tell us maybe we can bring the map in at this point but since you were involved quite heavily in the Battle of Fort Hue.vi Were you at Hue before you went to Khe Sanh?
DL: No—
WC: —To help the Marines up there?
DL: Yes—
WC: Or was it the other way around?
DL: No, the Counter Tet Offensive was before relieving the Marines at Khe Sanh.
WC: Uh huh.
DL: Let me find it on the (pointing to map) here. It is kind of hard to see, fist of all it is at a place called Camp Evans, just south of Quang Tri. It was strictly a military division four headquarters. You know, it stretched out pretty good because it was over a mile across, military encampment. We started out there (pointing to map) they sent us out on a place down the road a ways that was called PK 17. I was with the Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, and the 7th Cavalry. It was a South Vietnamese military post. We landed the helicopters there (pointing to map) and we were there for a couple of days. Then they sent us out after a downed helicopter and then we secured that. Then they sent us after another downed helicopter, which was in a little place just off highway one here (pointing to map) just on the west side of highway one. North of Hue about, I’m guessing somewhere around five or ten miles. They call it the TT woods, which is small woods. To me it looked like an over enlarged fairway. It was a long green strip. It was kind of doglegged in shape. It was probably two miles in length, a mile and a half in length, something like that. Basically, it was a farmer’s community where they normally would have lived. There was not anybody there. Then we were in another little smaller one, near it. [We] found out later that the downed helicopter in a rice paddy between our wood line and the other wood line. Had the— I think it was the 3rd core headquarters down there. They had a three-star Vietnamese general North Vietnamese in charge. They were heavily protected, dug in. It took us a while to make any in-roads into there.
I would say in the time we were there we physically lost about half of the company, I was with. Most of them were wounded and probably only a handful were actually killed. The Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 8 | P a g e
half that were wounded were gone for a while and some of them never came back. Some of them came back in a few days to a week or two depending on the seriousness of their injuries. That was one of the times that I think the troops learned to love their flak jackets. If you ever knew anybody with a flak jacket, they’re hot, they are heavy, and it was a pain in the rear to deal with them. We were being mortared on a regular basis. I think one of the infantry lieutenants was the real proving ground of how effective those flak jackets were, because he was sitting on the edge of a foxhole. One mortar round hit just behind him and literally shredded the backside of his flak jacket. When I went over there, I thought he was surely going to be dead. When I saw that, the inside of it just one or two pieces had penetrated it.
[0:20:00]
He was back out in the field in less than a week. After that, everybody knew flak jackets were a good thing. They saw for themselves that they worked. It was the only time, I think in Vietnam that I went on a battalion operation that they had the whole battalion. I said 1st Battalion, its 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry. The time we spent trying to penetrate that wood line over there it was not something easily done. We made an attack on it and were repulsed back. We got reinforcement from another battalion in a few days’. At nighttime [there were] forward observers. We would take turns at night. Naval ships would come in a little closer to the coastline at nighttime. We would adjust naval gunfire down into that area at night as well as any time they had any leftover ordinance from aircraft. We’d spot them somewhere in the—
WC: — Was this all part of the general effort to retake Hue, during Tet?
DL: Yeah, in fact at the time the Marines had come in from the south on three sides of Hue essentially. The north out to the A Shau Valley here (pointing to map) was the only one left open. We ended up closing that and when we closed it, they got out of the city. That is when they evacuated, is when we closed down there. During that period of time, I personally had more life-threatening encounters during that couple of weeks than the rest of my tour in Vietnam. It was early in my tour and I was beginning to wonder if the whole thing was going to be like this or not. In fact, that’s where I got my Purple Heart, as well as my Bronze Star, V Device, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.
WC: Did you actually— You know in this house-to-house street-by-street fighting that went on in Hue, were you—
DL: —I didn’t get involved
WC: —in the center?
DL: I read about it, you know in the Stars and Stripes Newspapers. As you remember, they had over there. It was telling about the house-to-house fighting just like in World War II in Germany. I never got involved in that physically because by the time we got right to the north edge of the city, they all left. They didn’t want to be, 100 percent surrounded Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 9 | P a g e
and so they left.
WC: Did, you move up to Khe Sanh, after that?
DL: No, we went back up to Camp Evans there, [our] main headquarters. Then we came out and established LZ on the, just on the edge of the mountains, between the A Shau Valley and Camp Evans there. LZ Long was named for a former battalion commander, Colonel Long. That was the battalion commander when I first joined the unit. He was replaced but they named it after him. The object was is to build supporting firebases all the way in to the A Shau Valley before the monsoon season hit. Then Khe Sanh came along where the Marines were being siege up here. Had two divisions of Marines up there and they could not get off their air base. They could not land planes on the runway or anything. They had to come in and just drop stuff out on a low flyover. They ceased that operation and took us up. I will always remember that day because the day we went into Khe Sanh was April Fools’ Day. You know, you read about all that stuff that was going on up there. Our company was selected to be the lead company for the division. The company commander was always in the first flight that went. Being his forward observer, I went with him. We were thankfully fogged in on our landing zone and so they took other bodies first. (laughs) I was expecting a lot of resistance. I can’t say I remember even being fired at in any point in time. You know maybe when we actually got on the airbase. I think maybe one time we were rocketed or something. No other time was my unit fired on. I guess they were effective in scaring them off.
WC: Tell us a little bit about life as a fire direction officer. You also spent time as a liaison officer and also as an executive officer so you were second in command for a company.
DL: Yeah, for a company size unit.
WC: —What do those jobs entail—
DL: —called batteries in orders.
WC: —and how is one different from another?
DL: You know the forward observer’s; in fact that was interesting [my] main job was to control the artillery fire in support of the troops. In conventional warfare, they taught us that 75 percent of all casualties are caused by artillery. They are a very important piece. The forward observers are what they call the eyes of the artillery. They are the ones that can see the enemy. With that high percentage of casualties caused by the artillery, you want to poke out the eyes. They always joked with us that the life expectancy of a forward observer in combat was about thirty seconds. That was in conventional type warfare and forward observers were with an actual unit. They were usually on the forward observer group, [which] was usually on their own in strategic locations to see the enemy. Vietnam there were no lines of demarcation as to where these are the front lines and these are the safe areas in the rear. There was no such thing. If you were there, that was your area and everything else was their area. That is kind of the way it always was. I Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 10 | P a g e
never went anywhere, as a forward observer that I was not with an infantry unit in support. Either down to platoon size is probably the smallest group I ever went with anywhere. I always had extra protection. Normally it was just the company-sized unit.
My second job, when I got relieved as forward observer. They sent me back to the firing battery to be one of the fire direction officers. They used to have two fire direction officers. We worked eight hours on, eight hours off, seven days a week. Arriving at the battery, they got a call from battalion headquarters. They wanted to talk to the battery commander, he came in, and I remember him saying, “But Sir, that’s being an Indian giver.” I knew he had to be talking about me because I just got there. (laughs) I said, “Okay where am I going?” They sent me out with the 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry as a liaison officer. The liaison officers helped control all the fire support for the infantry battalion from the battalion level and worked directly with the battalion commander and the battalion operations officer in doing so. We had our little area inside their technical operations center. Then any time that the battalion commander went somewhere that wasn’t to a staff meeting, I went with him. Being 1st, Air Cav. everywhere we went was in helicopters. That’s why I have at least one air medal. I probably should have gotten several others but no one ever kept track of my hours (laughs) officially.
WC: So it was a liaison between different echelons more than it was a liaison with let’s say the South Vietnamese military.
DL: It was a liaison between the artillery fire support and the infantry battalion itself.
WC: Okay.
DL: I was involved in all the planning of all the air assaults that were made at that point. Instead of going on them, I helped plan them. Then I went out with the battalion commander prior to the landing of the troops and adjusted fire onto the landing zone. [I] controlled the fire support to make sure that the area had been fired on before they landed the troops there.
[0:29:59]
I think my first action operation was as liaison officer. The first landing that we put out was my old company, Charlie Company. We put them on a hot LZvii so I was glad I was not the forward observer. (laughs) Even though they reported that, they had seen tracers coming up at our helicopter. When I told that to the Battalion S 2, he said, “Theirs or ours?” (laughs) Anytime when people are involved in accidents it is kind of a different kind of war that way. People did not like people telling you to go some place where you might get hurt. They tried to take it out on you. You heard of the times of people throwing hand grenades in either bunkers or foxholes with the commanding officers just because they didn’t like them and didn’t want to have to follow them anymore because he was too dangerous.
WC: That was happening even in early ‘68?Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 11 | P a g e
DL: Oh, yeah.
WC: Fragging or what was called fragging.
DL: Yep, that was going on. The second company commander I worked with Charlie Company the 5th of the 7th had been one of those bodies. He had been in there, I guess in the same foxhole with the hand grenade. I am pretty sure it wasn’t theirs. I never saw any; I guess that maybe they had some. I never saw one. (laughs) My several months running around in the field with an infantry company never saw them with a hand grenade. I assume it was one of ours. After he was healed up, he was sent back out into the field. It had a great effect on him. He was somewhat scared, I think. It affected the way he led that company it made the battalion commander mad at him. One time in the A Shau Valley, he sent us on a special mission, because we were being fired on several times from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, just south of where it came out of Laos. He sent us around the back way and he figured it would be a one-day operation. In three days, we were not where we supposed to be. I know at one time, at least in one day the front of the company passed me three times. They were going in circles. Now I don’t know if that was a collision between the company commander and the platoon leaders in the lead or if they were just that lost in the jungle like that. But, three times they passed me.
WC: Did you find yourself worried about being fragged yourself being and officer.
DL: No, because I wasn’t in what you would call command type position. I was there to support [them] and to help protect. I wasn’t there to lead them or direct them in anything that they did. I had a pretty good relationship with all the troops. In fact, they even told me that they had put a price on the battalion commander’s head. One time when I was the liaison officer, I was just over across the firebase talking to them one day. I said, “Wait minute guys. You can’t do that. He’s not the only one in that helicopter. Number one, I am there and so are several other people.” You know you wonder about that sometimes. The battalion commander at that time was a fairly gung-ho individual. He was interested in getting enemy body counts. He pushed his troops pretty hard into doing that. He was not very popular with the troops but he did get results.
WC: I was going to ask about that very thing. How you feel about the American strategy of body count versus taking and holding territory. What kind of an effect did that have on the morale of the men although you have almost already answered that?
DL: Yeah, I guess pretty much I did. You held some territory but most of it was open area. You wandered through to see what you could find, root out, [and] destroy. Soon as you, left it was free again to whomever and generally speaking they owned it. They tried to stay away from us as much as possible. That was one of the other strange things. It was real hard as a forward observer to provide a lot of fire support for them because when we got caught in ambushes. It wasn’t because we were a little ways away from them. We were usually very close to them. To bring in artillery fire would have probably been more dangerous to us than it would have been to them. We usually had to back off Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 12 | P a g e
before I was of much use. That is kind of like where I got my purple heart. We had got caught in an ambush just on the north side of Hue. In fact, it was the last obstacle we had before we walked into the city. We got caught in the ambush out in the rice paddies. We backed up to the last little housing area myself, the battalion operations officer, the artillery liaison officer, and at least two other of the forward observers plus our RTO.viii Were all congregated in this one little spot trying to figure out what to do and what kind of fire support we needed. We kept seeing these mortar rounds come in and they landed probably a good hundred, 150 yards short of us. They came in pairs of two. Every few minutes they would do that but they were always about the same distance short. Then all of the sudden one landed out in the road by us. I think out of the group of us that here was only two or three that did not pick up some kind of shrapnel. I was one of the fortunate ones. I was not severely wounded but it was enough to get my Purple Heart. I had a small piece of shrapnel probably just on my wrist here, near my watch area. In fact, I think probably the little white spot right there. Then another one went under my flak jacket. It went under the skin and sunk up against my collarbone. That’s what we were doing. We backed off our shooting so we were hammered like fools. We are all congregated in one spot in the open, and they caught us doing that.
WC: While you were in Vietnam, how did you feel about the win ability of the war given the strategy of body counts and the falling morale and other factors?
DL: I would say it appeared from everything I could see that we were winning. Our body count to our losses, we counted many more bodies than we lost, and especially killed. We never saw one of their bodies unless it was dead and a lot of times we didn’t even see those. They were very good about hauling them off. Anyway, they could and I think that was probably to keep us from knowing how many we had killed or wounded. They got rid of them if they could, but we still counted more bodies than we ever lost. It appeared from that standpoint that we were winning. There was a lot more going on. We had all the fire support, all the air support, and they had they had very little. They had some mortars, some rockets, but they had no air. I never saw a Vietnamese aircraft period, at least not among the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese. We had all the superior firepower. I don’t remember ever being fired on by any well— I take it back. I’m not sure if it was a tank or an actual gun emplacement. When we were in the A Shau Valley, I picked up the shell fragments from it. Fortunately, I wasn’t in it (laugh) and it went right through.
That was interesting too— probably the way we lived in the field. Instead of pup tents, which were heavy canvas we used ponchos, which were very light. By snapping two ponchos together and cutting down either some bamboo or other limbs and trees. You could build yourself a little tent to sleep in. If you acquired a third poncho you would close in one end of the little tent that you made. Myself, my Recon sergeant, my RTO all slept in the same tent usually. At this particular point in the A Shau Valley where we were sitting just off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, essentially cutting it so that they could not bring supplies and things down the trail. They brought in, I was told after I picked up some of the shell fragments and they analyzed them a 76 mm gun off a tank.
[0:40:02]Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 13 | P a g e
I could see the muzzle flashing but I could never see what it was coming from. Probably, I am guessing about a mile across the ravine there. The trail came in Laos, then off Little Finger, made a little U, and then came down into the A Shau Valley. We were sitting right up on the end of it there. There is a little ravine down where it came in to Laos. That was the other thing that was frustrating. We were not allowed to shoot into Laos. I tried to trick them one time after we first got there, by starting short and keep adjusting it further, because I could see people on the Laotian side of the border coming down the trail. As I got close to the border, the fire direction officer had done his homework already and had his charts set up even though he had only been there a very short time. He asked how many more adjustments I was going to do, because we were getting close to the border. (laughter) I canceled the firing—
WC: —As many as it takes.
DL: I was hoping he didn’t have his charts set up where knew where the border was yet.
WC: Yeah.
DL: But he did so.
WC: How much did you know about what was happening in the United States at the time that you were there? Did you know about the increased activism of the anti-war movement? Especially, in response to the Tet Offensive did you have the paper, Armed forces radio or—
DL: —Radio and strictly the—
WC: — and how did how did you feel about what was happening in the States—
DL: — Stars and Stripes newspaper was what we saw. There was things in there pretty much that you saw, the anti-war sentiments. I don’t remember them particularly talking about the Tet Offensive necessarily.
WC: Well my point is that the Tet Offensive just fueled the anti-war movement. The skepticism directed at Lyndon Johnson and if we were winning the war then how could the enemy have mounted this kind of offensive. That was like fanning the flames of the anti-war movement. How did you all talk about the anti-war movement or talk about what was happening back in the, in the States?
DL: Oh yeah, we joked about it a little bit. Things, they would say, don’t tell anybody you are a vet or you would take your medals down to coffee shop and a quarter you could get a cup of coffee. You know things like that. It was bothersome to realize you weren’t really being supported from home. There was a lot of anti-war. I have to admit, Clinton was one of the biggest ones later that bothered me, being president of the United States. I call it that, I guess this is my opinion, cowarding out and running off to another country to Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 14 | P a g e
avoid serving. I don’t think he had a right to be president because of that but my opinion.
WC: You say you shared a poncho with two other guys. Was that part of the conversation sometimes at night? What is happening back in the United States and are the people back there supporting us –
DL: –You know politically I don’t remember talking about that at all.
WC: –and like, any letters from home that.
DL: Sometimes talk about war, talk about families things like that but the people I was with we seldom talked about the political aspects of the war.
WC: Okay. The press coverage did not affect you that much because it was mostly Stars and Stripes.
DL: Yeah.
WC: As I recall from Stars and Stripes from the time I was this little it was mostly sports coverage anyway.
DL: We had a couple photographers with us there on that counter Tet Offensive as we hit what we called the earlier, in the TT woods. When we actually finally made the final attack there and took over than north end of that area we did have two photographers with us.
WC: Okay, let’s switch now for the last part to when you came back to the states. Tell me when you were separated from active duty and were you discharged at the same time or did you go into inactive reserve period after that?
DL: No. When I came back, I came back as a first lieutenant and was promoted to captain about a month and a half later. I was at Fort Ord, California as a basic training company commander. I was in for about four more years after that. I do not know if you want to cover any of that periods or just when the war phased down and they actually got out of it. During the war they had accelerated promotions. I was promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant, it was twelve months and then it was only another twelve months from second lieutenant to captain. At the time, I was promoted to captain the average time and grade to promotion to major was about thirty-three months. When I got out I had four and a half years time and graded as captain and I still needed another four years to be eligible for promotion to major. Everything lengthened back out again and by doing, that they left a lot of people stuck at captains. They came through and looked for voluntary discharges. They went through and took out everybody they didn’t want, that they felt from their efficiency reports and things that they did not meet standards. Then they came back and riffed about 5,000 officers of which about 4,500 of them were captains. Then the next year they came back and riffed another 5,000, almost all of them captains, and I was one of them. Part of the criteria for that was the fact that I was a Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 15 | P a g e
reserve officer on active duty. My commission out of OSC was as a reserve officer and they could not riff any of what they called RA or regular officers.
WC: Was that okay with you to get out at that point—
DL: —I had not planned on it but yeah. They gave me the GI bill that allowed me to go back and finish my education, which I wanted to do anyway. My wife enjoyed not being, able to use her favorite statement that was always “I hate the Army.” I think it was probably better not moving around so much and things like that.
WC: Yeah. How do you think having been in Vietnam affected you when you were at Fort Ord or trying to make that decision about whether I should stay in or maybe is this a good idea for a career or not?
DL: Yeah well, it is part of the reason I switched to the air defense branch at that time. I thought well if I stay, they are not sending them back as often. That is how I got to Fort Bliss, Texas and three years I spent in Germany was with an air defense unit. Other than that, probably didn’t think a lot. I just looked at how often the people were going back to Nam and trying to minimize my chances. I had a year and a half of college. What was available to somebody in in my position like that? I needed a lot of education to get a decent job to support a family. At that point in time, I had a wife— well I was married before I went in. Then we had my oldest daughter [who] was three months old when I deployed to Vietnam. Somewhere, you have to support your family and at the time, I was making good money relatively speaking. I was making as much money as most college graduates and had been out for a year or two. It looked like a good way to go as long as I could keep from being killed doing it.
WC: What was coming home like? You were still on active duty and you continued on active duty but what was it like to leave Vietnam and come back to the United States? When you were around your friends or around your family how did it feel?
DL: Well it felt good to be back. Family and friends that I knew, most of them were supportive you know. I never ran in to the problems a lot of people ran in to when they seemed to be hated and things like that because they’d served. Of course my two older brothers both had served during Korea and they were aware of the military experience. My young brother joined the Navy about six months after I went in and he was in during that whole period of time also. In fact, he died of cancer about, a year I think after I got out. You know, I didn’t see a whole lot of difference before and after being in Vietnam, personally. Either that or I was just too dumb to realize I was being discriminated against or whatever because of it. (laughter)
[00:50:03]
DL: I just didn’t notice it.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 16 | P a g e
WC: So, what year would it have been that you would have been’73 that you came to Provo to finish school?
DL: Yeah, that is when I was just finishing a tour of duty in Germany. I had been slated to go to the career course at Fort Bliss, Texas when the riff came through. I came here to finish school and we thought just for a couple years. It turned out I been here now thirty-seven. (laughs)
WC: What was the feeling here in Utah Valley about Vietnam? When people found out that you were a veteran did that matter?
DL: Most people seemed very supportive. I guess, for a place in the country to be it was a good place, because of the Church associations and people looked at you as a friend. I can’t remember at any place, any time that I remember anybody discriminating against me or making negative comments towards me because I was a veteran.
WC: If you feel as though other people’s feelings about you and your service had not changed or was not negative. How were your feelings about trust in the government, or patriotism, or love of country, or cynicism about what the government says to justify. For example, actions in Vietnam had you become anymore cynical as a result of being in Vietnam about what the government said and believing it?
DL: I think if you want to call it cynicism I had, was the fact that we pulled out without completing the mission. I thought we wasted a lot of people’s lives, time, and money not to accomplish what we set out to do.
WC: Okay.
DL: Giving up personally hurt.
WC: For you the problem was not that the war was wrong or unwinnable, for you the problem was that the war was just not completed.
DL: Yeah—
WC: —It wasn’t prosecuted correctly—
DL: —We didn’t have a decision made. Just like Korea, we never made a decision in Korea. We are still having trouble with Korea.
WC: Yeah, okay. Were there any veteran services when you came back? Were there any opportunities among other vets or other groups of people? Maybe it was within the Church to talk out your experiences to help you assimilate or to adjust better to society?
DL: I never really felt like I had any problem. You know, if there were services available I Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 17 | P a g e
didn’t seek them and nobody sought me to be a part of them. I have never had nightmares about it. I felt, I did duty and accomplished my responsibility in a manner in such I have no regrets about what I did or how I did it for the most part. I mean, you know there are always little things here and there we should have done differently. I felt I served my country honorably and I had no regrets.
WC: What movies have you seen about the war or books have you read about the war—
DL: —I’m not much of a book reader so
WC: —Were any of them particularly accurate?
DL: I have seen a few yeah. Was it, John Wayne and The Green Berets? I saw Platoon. Seemed like there was another one but I remember the name of it. Platoon was probably the most, what I would consider accurate depiction of the war that I saw. Even though the experiences they put into a few day periods there was about what I experienced the whole year I was there. That’s what you got to do in Hollywood. You have to make all—
WC: — It’s Oliver Stone—
DL: — You can’t have all the dull stuff in between. (laughs)
WC: Did you see Full Metal Jacket?
DL: No, I have never seen that one.
WC: Okay, because you were in Hue that’s what—
DL: — that is what it is about?
WC: — half of the movie is about Hue.
DL: Yeah, okay.
WC: Have you, have you ever thought about going back to Vietnam? Have you been back, or do you want to go back?
DL: — I have not been back and in fact, my middle daughter right now lives in Singapore. At some point in time, I am hoping to get out to visit her there. One of the things she mentioned is that they have tours out there to go back to Vietnam.
WC: Right.
DL: [She] wanted to know if I would be interested in that. I thought it might be interesting to do. Depending on how restricted you are from where you go, what you can do to see some of the places that I have been.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 18 | P a g e
WC: What do you think that life would be like for you today if you had not gone in to the military? A follow-up is if you had not gone to Vietnam who would Dan Lukins be today?
DL You want to know the honest truth? I would probably end up being a retired JC Penney worker. (laughs) I worked on and off with JC Penney for a little over four years both before and after my LDS mission. In fact, I graduated from high school when I was seventeen and about a month after I turned eighteen I was the shoe department manager for one of the old small Penney stores. They did not have the big malls in those days where you had these huge, humungous big stores. I went in to what they call the JC Penney managerial training program. I used to come in early and study these manuals books I would work on. I shifted my major in college from math and sciences to business. Thought that is probably what I would do with my life. I probably would have considered and continued in that career line.
WC: What do you think the United States has learned from its experiences in Vietnam?
DL: Well seeing that they did almost the same thing that they did in Korea I don’t think, (laughs) I hope they have learned something. To me, you don’t get involved in things if there is not a reason to. If you have a reason to, then do it. I can see why, politically speaking, they had to get out because they were going to lose the election. (laughs) It was becoming a political game and I hate wars being fought by politicians. Don’t fight them if that is the case or let the politicians go and fight them. (laughs) Let them see what it’s like and maybe they will not have so many. Yeah, but if it is going to be a political thing then forget it.
WC: In looking at Iraq and Afghanistan do you see anything that we are doing correctly with regard to those wars that we may have learned a lesson from Vietnam? That can include military strategy, or the reasons for being there, or could include the way that a soldier men and women are treated in country when they come back.
DL: I think they are treated better as (laughs) a whole coming back just from what I saw [in the] news coverage not from my own personal experience. I think they are trying, at least I don’t think they went in to Iraq and Iran to totally take over the country. They were trying to secure a government in place. They are trying and it appears they are trying now. South Vietnam lasted how long after we pulled out. Was it even twelve months?
WC: The war went on for two more years from ’73 to ’75 then the south just collapsed.
DL: They lasted two years. I think they are trying not to let that happen in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They are trying to get the government there that can sustain support. You are, coming up with a totally different ballgame there. I mean in in Vietnam, Korea we didn’t have anybody that was threatening the United States directly. With Iran and Afghanistan factions that are there and using those as safe havens are threatening the US and so it is kind of a different. I think 9/11 made that war seem way different because no Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 19 | P a g e
time during Korea and no time during Vietnam did we have anybody blow up anything in the US by a foreign power.
[1:00:09]
WC: Yes, that is a curious thing about Vietnam is that if you ask the question who won that war or who lost that war the answer’s probably the North Vietnamese won the war because they accomplished their objective.
DL: That’s what I would say.
WC: But if you look at the physical United States after the war and you look at the physical Vietnam after the war. You are going to come to a different conclusion because that country was devastated.
DL: Oh, yeah.
WC: Physically, and any other way by that war the United States was untouched. I’m not talking about the way people were treated. It’s an interesting way to define loss and victory because the United States was never threatened, never touched, never bombed. Twice the tonnage of bombs were dropped on Vietnam then were dropped in all of World War II all around the world.
DL: I saw some of those—
WC: — But they won the war.
DL: (laughs) I saw some of those close-up. Couple of them scared me. I thought they were a little too close. One woke me up in the middle of the night, one of the little B-52 arc lights. When I was talking about the action in the A Shau Valley there were two, [that] came across Little Finger and then down into the valley. They ran and I have to admit those guys were accurate. I mean they came right down there and they went right down that finger, and hit it. They did not hit off behind it and they didn’t hit off in the valley. They walked it right in that finger; right off, that road and they came back and hit it going the other way. Scared the devil out of me though because I didn’t know what was going on because I was asleep [and] they did not tell us it was coming.
WC: Last question I have is do you have a message for students today or students in the future who are going to—
DL: — Well, you kind of touched on it there a little bit. They say there are winners and losers in wars but everybody loses. War is hell. I saw a lot of people thinking it was a glorious thing to go to war but once they were there they soon learned that it’s not. It is scary, it’s hard, it’s dangerous, and it’s not even comfortable. I’m a person that didn’t have much trouble sleeping but I had a hard time sleeping with rain drizzling in my face. It just did not work well. I even slept on the hard rocks a couple times. My air mattress that I Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 20 | P a g e
normally carried with me— That’s one of the things I mentioned about the tank firing earlier. That one of the rounds from that went right through my tent went in one side, out the other side, hit a log about ten feet the other side then it went off and totally shredded my air mattress and my tent. (laughs). Fortunately, I was not in it, nor was my Recon sergeant or my RTO. Because when the firing started we immediately moved to a different position to observe what was going on and see if we could return fire. This was a very difficult thing because I couldn’t tell who was firing what. I couldn’t pick my rounds out from anybody else’s so I couldn’t adjust them. (laughs) I told them to cancel the fire mission. I’ll wait until (laughs) something else so I can do something productive. No sense wasting all that ammunition when you don’t know where it is going.
WC: Do you want to tell us a little about what you brought what we commonly refer to as fruit salad. Do you want to tell us about your campaign ribbons and I will just ask if anybody else has a question before we close?
DL: Oh yeah, I guess I got nine ribbons, ten awards actually. I have two Bronze Stars, one V Device is for valor. The Oak leaf cluster was for mediatory service. The Air Medal was awarded on a certain number of combat assault missions that you went on or a number of actual hours you were in the air over a combat area. I never guessed, I probably would of actually earned somewhere between ten and twenty medals. When you see the Air Medal you see them with numbers on them because of that. The Purple Heart, I talked about a little bit earlier. I got there, in fact the Bronze Star V Device also came and part of the Air Medal was earned there. And down here this is an award from the Vietnamese government; it’s called the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star. Even though I should have polished it up, it looks a little more bronze right now a little dirty. Same way with the US awarding here is what’s called the Vietnamese Service Ribbon. I have Five Campaign Stars and for five they put silver on it. It was always more impressive when it had four. I had Four Bronze Stars across there it looked more impressive than the one silver star. The Army Commendation Medal here is one I got at Fort Ord, California when I was basic training company commander. For the quarter my basic training company and I would say probably about twenty-five training companies, well we won every competition there was (laughs) that cycle, or that quarter. I was almost in the process, I think I had my orders already to go to Fort Bliss, Texas to join the Chaparral Boldron unit there that was going to deploy to Germany. And then talking to the battalion commander one day and he was talking about all the things that had happened and I just happened to mention to him, I says, “Got enough to get an Army Commendation medal?” He says, “I will put you in for that.” So he did. Good conduct medal is awarded to enlisted men only. You have to have at least one year of enlisted service with no problems. I barely qualified for that. One year and almost exactly to the day from the time I enlisted I got my commission as second lieutenant. I got that—
WC: —Oh, so you did not get in trouble you just got promoted to second lieutenant—
DL: —I just got promoted to second lieutenant, yeah.
WC: I thought there was a better story in this.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 21 | P a g e
DL: Well, it was always interesting. When I originally went in, I was interested in aviation. I figured after I got in I would reapply for flight school. I signed up for Air Traffic Control School as I mentioned earlier. While I was at basic training, I started taking all these battery of tests. They took me for everything, I was qualified for it seemed like and the only thing I was not qualified for was West Point because I was married. (laughs) They didn’t take me for that. But OCSix was one of the things they took me out and tested me for. We had one captain [and] one second lieutenant because of the shortage of officers that is we only had two instead of six officers in the company. The captain we seldom saw so the second lieutenant that was in the company did everything. He says you don’t want to be a second lieutenant, at least not on this post. (laughs) He was trying to talk us out of it, all of us that went to take the OCS test. Commissioned officers are there to affix responsibility and second lieutenants, that’s as far down the hill as everything can flow. They’re the ones who get all the dirty jobs. Later you get to tell who gets what jobs. The green ribbon down here is actually a Vietnamese awarded Service Ribbon and the other one is a National Defense Service Medal. They’re all in according to rank, according to who awards them. In other words, all US awards are first by rank, the Bronze Star being the highest on the ones I have. This is the dividing line between the American awarded, the Vietnamese awarded medals, and so they are in rank according to how they fit in the Vietnamese.
WC: I am very impressed that you remember all of that. Are there any questions that you all have before we go? Brady?
Brady: I have a question. Do you keep in contact with any friends from Vietnam or your military service at all?
DL: Not really. I did for a while but not from Vietnam. No I don’t think I ever got a home address of anybody. I mean the people I served with. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever even seen anybody, I knew in Vietnam since I’ve been back and I can’t remember ever seeing anybody.
[1:09:59]
WC: Do you; have any reunions you go to? Now that the internet has unit histories for just about every unit, have you checked on of those on there?
DL: Yeah, I keep getting in, been tempted but my wife is never interested in those kind of things. The 7th Cavalry always has a reunion every summer, somewhere. They include me as being a member of the 7th Cavalry because I was assigned to them as FO when I was a liaison officer. In fact, all the time I was in Vietnam whatever I did I was working with the 5th Battalion 7th Cavalry in one form or another that entire year. Some of the other people I ran into but mostly because the church associations stayed in touch with them, than from that. I think there were only four people I met in Vietnam that I knew before I went there. Two of them were in my OCS class and the third one I knew from church. He and I were both stationed at Fort Carson at the same time and both ended up Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 22 | P a g e
in Vietnam about the same time. Assigned to the same artillery unit, only he supported a different battalion of the 7
th Cavalry than I did. We ran into each other occasionally. In fact, we had our own church service those of us, had our own sacrament meeting the night before we went into Khe Sanh.
WC: Did you keep in touch with him when after Vietnam?
DL: No, I haven’t. I will not say why because somebody will probably see this and it will get back to her. Probably cut that part out. My wife has never been that interested in, for some reason, keeping track of them. I know one of them lives in St. George and I have been to St. George a few times. I know he’s there, but I’ve never looked him up because of that.
WC: Dane?
Dane: In general, how did the South Vietnamese accept us there?
DL: You know that’s real hard to say. Most everywhere I was personally, in Vietnam was what you call a free fire zone. If you saw Vietnamese in there, you assumed he was the enemy and you shot at him. I was in a base camp totally military buildup area and I was rarely anywhere else. I think when I was in An Khe, I went down to what they called Sin City to see what it was. It was just outside the thing. I guess one of the previous commanding generals of the 1st Air Cav. had set it up originally as a place for the soldiers to be, that was safe. You checked out all the prostitutes to make sure they didn’t have any venereal diseases. He got in big trouble for that one with the politicians when they when they found out so they cut the ties but it was still there when I was there. There was one other little village but at the time, they probably wouldn’t have been too happy with us. In what they called, a Court Rolling Search Operation a little village outside the base camp we were assigned to circle it and then go through it and look for any signs of anybody that might be associated with the enemy. They probably were not too happy with us. I rarely ever saw South Vietnamese people. South Vietnamese soldiers seemed to be friendly towards us. Now that’s one of the things, I thought was really interesting though, the South Vietnamese soldiers. My first experience seeing them was at the little place I told you about earlier called PK 17 and you’d see them walking down a path you know in uniforms. They are short people; probably you know most of them were not any taller than, five [foot] five [inches] at the most. But they would be holding hands. (laughs) Military uniforms with their weapons slung over the shoulder [and] holding hands. Different culture it was different. Loved their burial grounds, out in the rice paddies it was the only place that there was any protection because they were built up because of the water tables and things. They actually buried them on the ground and covered them up so there was a mountain. There was some place to hide behind. (laughs) The rice itself didn’t provide much protection. (laughter) Things like that I was amazed at how rundown— And I only saw a few rural schools and things like that. They were usually three to five room buildings that were really beat up pretty bad and run down. I felt sorry for them. Like Bill mentioned earlier, the war was all fought on their ground and it just literally destroyed the country in places. All that Agent Orange –I used to Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 23 | P a g e
watch them spray that all the time. I would see them fly over and spray areas and fly over that a couple months later and you could see the ground. You couldn’t see it before. Things like that, there was something else a thought popped into my mind then it popped back out.
WC: Well I hope on one of your trips to see your daughter in Singapore that you do take a side trip to Vietnam.
DL: She mentioned that was something she would be interested in.
WC: Yeah. Anymore questions before we go? Catherine?
CM: Just about the ribbons. Now this shows my ignorance of how that all works. The ones that came from the north, from the South Vietnamese government, was that awarded to you by a government official or was there a ceremony?
DL: Well the green and white one you just get for being there.
CM: Okay, alright.
DL: The other one was awarded by the Vietnamese Government but I think it was actually given to me by an American contingency.
CM: Okay, on behalf of them?
DL: On behalf of them.
CM: Alright, thanks.
WC: Good question, anything else?
DL: That’s the same way as the National Defense Service Ribbon. All you had to do was be in the military and you got that one. So everybody who was in the military got that one. You always got at least one.
CM: Okay, I haven’t heard much about that one.
WC: Well, then that brings to a close our interview and I want to say Dan, thank you so much.
DL: You are welcome.
WC: We’re very grateful for the information that you have given us.
DL: Sorry, I wasn’t more helpful on some of those questions.
WC: No, that’s wonderful. Thank you all for being here.Vietnam Era Oral History:Lukins 24 | P a g e
[1:17:27]
END OF INTERVIEW
i (UVU) Utah Valley University
ii Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS)
iii (BYU) Brigham Young University
iv Lyndon Baines Johnson
v (FO) Forward Observer
vi Battle fought beginning January 31, 1968 when the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) soldiers launched a coordinated attack on the city of Hué.
vii (LZ)
viii (RTO) Radio Telephone Officer
ix(OCS) Officer Candidates School